Because of the difficulty posed by the contrast between the search for truth and truth itself, Michael Polanyi believes that we must alter the foundation of epistemology to include as essential to the very nature of mind, the kind of groping that constitutes the recognition of a problem. This collection of essays, assembled by Marjorie Grene, exemplifies the development of Polanyi's theory of knowledge which was first presented in _Science, Faith, and Society_ and later systematized in _Personal Knowledge_. (...) Polanyi believes that the dilemma of the modern mind arises from the peculiar relation between the positivist claim for total objectivity in scientific knowledge and the unprecedented moral dynamism characterizing the social and political aspirations of the last century. The first part of _Knowing and Being_ deals with this theme. Part two develops Polanyi's idea that centralization is incompatible with the life of science as well as his views on the role of tradition and authority in science. The essays on tacit knowing in Part Three proceed directly from his preoccupation with the nature of scientific discovery and reveal a pervasive substructure of all intelligent behavior. Polanyi believes that all knowing involves movement from internal clues to external evidence. Therefore, to explain the process of knowing, we must develop a theory of the nature of living things in general, including an account of that aspect of living things we call "mind." Part Four elaborates upon this theme. (shrink)

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF OURSELVES and our place in nature constitutes, if not the central, at least a central problem of metaphysics. Yet, faced with this question, modern philosophical thought has for the most part swung helplessly between an empty idealism and an absurd reductivism. It is time we overcame our narrow factionalism and learned not only to think more independently ourselves about persons, minds, and living nature, but to profit from the efforts of those who have already given us concepts (...) and arguments which could help us along this road. Among such writings, Helmuth Plessner's major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, seems to me outstanding, in that it provides both a firm rational basis for the biological sciences, in their many-levelled structure, and for the sciences of man. (shrink)

THE HYPERBOLICAL DOUBT OF THE FIRST MEDITATION is often taken for the epitome of skepticism. Thus Myles Burnyeat, in his 1982 paper, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” argues that Descartes goes further than the ancient skeptics in doubting the existence of his own body—a given of everyday experience they never doubted. Nor was “the existence of the external world,” which was imperiled by the agency of the evil demon and has been recurrently questioned ever since, (...) a major subject for doubt in the skeptical tradition. Moreover, Burnyeat explains, Descartes was able to carry skepticism to this extreme because his doubt was merely methodological: it left his provisional rules of conduct intact while he was searching theoretically for a truth that would itself be in the first instance theoretical. Of course we should not forget that eventually, Descartes believed, the truth he was on the way to discovering would have excellent consequences for practice also, namely, in medicine, mechanics, and morality. Meantime, however, Burnyeat is certainly correct in maintaining that Cartesian doubt was indeed insulated against practice—as Hume’s doubt would eventually be also, confined as it was to his closet. So Descartes, and other modern skeptics after him, could be as skeptical as you like, as skeptical as any one can be. The ancient skeptics could not go that far, Burnyeat argues, because it was daily life they were concerned with, not some purely theoretical gambit. Like the philosophers of other Hellenistic schools—though differently, of course—they were seeking peace of mind, and they wanted to eliminate those unnecessary questions about hidden things—causes or “ultimate” realities—that served to obstruct the state of mind they called “tranquillity.” Merely methodologically, doubt can become much more radical, and it is that radicalization that, with the help of his demon, Descartes accomplishes. (shrink)

To what extent and in what sense is the being of a person a historical way of being? To what extent? Comprehensively and fundamentally. To be a person is to be a history. In what respect? In two respects, opposed but related. On the one hand, being a person is an achievement of a living individual belonging to a natural kind whose genetic endowment and possible behaviors provide the necessary conditions for that achievement. On the other hand, a human being (...) becomes the person he is within, and as one expression of, a complex network of artifacts—language, ritual, social institutions, styles of art and architecture, cosmologies and myths—that constitute a culture. A culture, of course, is itself a sedimentation of the actions of past persons; but it is, nevertheless, preexistent with respect to the development of any particular person. Great innovators may change their societies, but they have to be born into, and grow up in, some society, however radically they may come to alter, perhaps even to destroy it. Admittedly, the distinction between nature and culture is a commonplace; I am trying to introduce it here, however, not as a simple dichotomy, but as an internal relation essential in its integrity to the being of human beings. Helmuth Plessner has spoken of the natural artificiality of man: a human being is an individual member of the species homo sapiens, to whose development, even as a living thing, inherence in an artifactual medium is necessary. It is our nature to need the artificial; we come to ourselves not only as users of, but as dwellers within, a tightly woven net of artifacts. Even for his physiological development, for the achievement of reproduction, sustenance, rest, and so on, a human being needs, in general, a roof over his head, a language, theories of some kind about the way things are, at least minimal apprenticeship in a trade or calling, etc. Thus human nature, being dependent on culture, is itself historical. For a culture is an historical artifact interiorized in the life history of each of its participants, and to be one of those participants consists precisely in that process of interiorization. That is the chief lesson, for example, of Adolf Portmann’s study of the first year of life, or, as he calls it, the year of the social uterus. Our young, like those of other higher mammals, are born with their senses wide awake, yet, like the lower mammals, and unlike other higher forms, they have to hug the nest, lying recumbent, in order to assimilate, in their dependency, the structure of their immediate human community. Only in the second year of life, when they have learned to walk and to speak, will they enter on a course of what will eventually be responsible actions. In its natural as well as cultural aspect, humanity is something to be achieved, and the person is the history of that achievement. It is in this dual, yet single, sense that the being of the person is historical. (shrink)

STRAUS'S Vom Sinn der Sinne was published in 1935, Kurt Goldstein's Der Aufbau des Organismus had been published the previous year, E. Minkowski's Le Temps Vécu in 1933, Helmuth Plessner's Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch in 1928. In the European literature of philosophical anthropology and, more broadly, of philosophical biology, all these works have exerted a profound influence. In particular, when one reads this literature, the phrase "das schöne Buch von E. Straus" becomes almost a fixed epithet like (...) "swift-foot Achilles" or "the incomparable Mr. Newton." Even Buytendijk, who takes issue with Straus's theory of sensing, pays tribute to—and borrows a great deal from—particular Strausian themes. (shrink)